Sea Salt Caramel-Stuffed Snickerdoodles

Want the full name of these cookies? It would be Sea Salt Caramel-Stuffed Brown Butter Snickerdoodles. I know.

My love affair with everything that comes out of the Ambitious Kitchen blog has continued, and when I made Monique’s brown butter snickerdoodles a few weeks ago it was as if I’d never tasted a snickerdoodle before. Because I’d never tasted a snickerdoodle like this before. The brown butter and dark brown sugar made the cookies taste almost like little caramel-cinnamon delights. Which got me thinking about caramel…

And specifically about salted caramel, because that’s my favorite kind.

And then I thought, what if I took this caramel-y cookie and stuffed more caramel inside? Would it be caramel overload? Or caramel heaven? Well, I can tell you now, it’s caramel heaven.

With the caramel inside, the cookies take on an intensely chewy texture, but still have that snickerdoodle crisp on the outside. These babies are rich – for maybe the first time in my adult life, I really can’t eat more than one cookie in a sitting – but that one cookie is so nutty, so perfectly textured, so simple yet complex in flavor, one is all you need.

I skipped the traditional snickerdoodle last step of rolling the dough in a cinnamon-sugar mix because I really wanted to let the caramel flavor take center stage here, but feel free to do the rolling if you’d like an extra punch of cinnamon.

The caramels I used were Trader Joe’s Fleur de Sel Caramels, which are a chewy salted caramel.

If you use a very soft caramel, your cooled cookies will have a very soft center. If you use a hard caramel, your cooled cookies will have a hard center (I wouldn’t recommend this way).

I hope you can find the time to give these a try this weekend…and of course, that you love them as much as I do!